{"id":3000,"date":"2010-05-18T19:08:26","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T02:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=3000"},"modified":"2012-12-21T06:49:03","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T14:49:03","slug":"focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/18\/focus\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sucked as an expat.<\/p>\n

As an inveterate traveler, this was shameful to me, I was embarrassed by the bouts of homesickness. I was ashamed of the days I spent bleakly staring at what was, by all accounts, a breathtakingly beautiful landscape and wishing, with all my might, that I was elsewhere. I felt awkward and out of place at dinner tables even though I was surrounded by people who were kind and hospitable, who complimented my clumsy German while they swerved effortlessly in and out of English. I felt both invisible and too obvious in public, walking the pedestrian avenues of the nearby market town. Supermarkets flustered me — I could not bag my own groceries, translate the amount the checkout clerk asked me for, and count out the still unfamiliar currency at the same time. I was laden with change I was unable to spend because I couldn’t decipher the coins fast enough.<\/p>\n

I’ve been reading the journals of a young friend who’s spending a semester in Central America. We go way back — his mom hired me for a job many years ago and we grew into that not-quite-family relationship that you have with people who you are delighted to see uninvited on your porch. I get to read the journal emails the wandering son sends to his extended family back home — they are a joy, he has a fantastic way with words. He declined when I offered to set him up with a blog — too much pressure to produce, he smartly said. I was disappointed because I wanted to be able to share, but I understand and respect his reasons.<\/p>\n

Recently, this young traveler wrote about how pleased he was that he’d found a friend, on his own, without the intercession of his hosts. As a failed expat, the significance of his remark wasn’t wasted on me. I promptly hammered off email to his mom. “This is a big deal,” I told her, “and means that odds are excellent that he’s happy.” I was reminded of the time I went for coffee with a classmate in my German for Auslanders course. She was my neighbor, a real pistol of a young woman. Raised Muslim in Kosovo, she’d married a Catholic Austrian, moved into his house on the family farm, and worked night shift at a local factory while learning German during the day. She took me to the place she liked to go, a cafe at the local bowling alley. It was full of refugees, Croations and Slavs smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. We spoke English; she told me how annoyed she was that her husband wanted to name their first son Maximilian, after the emperor. I don’t remember why this irked her but I remember thinking that Emperor Max would have hated her, he wasn’t exactly kind to minorities.<\/p>\n

While we sat in the cafe, I was both delighted and sad. I loved sitting there with her, German pop in the background, Bosnians in cheap sweaters smoking at the next table, because I felt like I was a real person, like I was outlined in black. During most of my time as an expat, I felt smudgy and out of focus. The refugees I talked to thought I was crazy; why had I left America? Even after I told them I’d married an Austrian, they weren’t satisfied; why hadn’t he moved to the US? She was something, my neighbor and classmate, carving out her new life by sheer force of will, as were other refugees I met, but we had nothing in common but our outsiderness and sitting with her, drinking strong coffee and breathing second hand smoke reminded me of our differences.<\/p>\n

When you travel through a place, you don’t have to participate in daily existence with those who live there. Your eyes can stick wherever they want, you can catch tiny details like graffiti or sweaters that remind you of bad drag queens back home. You can put up with the smoky cafe for the afternoon, you will be somewhere else tomorrow, the next day. You can be lonely and then remember, “Oh, I expect to be lonely, this isn’t my home.” A human connection is a surprise, a delight, not a lifeline. When you shift from passive observer to resident, though, it’s not an minor nuisance that soy sauce only comes in three ounce bottles or that you haven’t had a real conversation with anyone but your mate in three weeks. I get angry when I read cute little expat memoirs that present a quirky yet affectionate view of a magical life abroad because they don’t tell the whole story. Maybe it’s possible to have a mostly seamless transition to life in a new country, to fall into expat life like a comfortable bed. Maybe. But I don’t believe it, not for a minute.<\/p>\n

It’s tempting to blame my failure as an expat on Austria herself, but that’s not fair. People were kind and hospitable, the country is beautiful, breathtakingly so, the food is so much better than you imagine. It’s a lovely place. Now that I have expat life a few years behind me, I wonder if it’s not my traveling style that undid me as an expat. Maybe you need a broader view. If you observe too acutely, the graffiti is offensive, the sweaters are sad hand-me-downs. No place can hold up to that kind of intense scrutiny. I never reached detente with Austria, I never stopped looking much too closely, I never backed up to take a longer view. I couldn’t switch off the message in my brain that said, “Hey! We’re in a foreign place so observe carefully, because we might not be this way again.” I woke up every day an outsider, every day a tourist, and looked, hard, at where I was.<\/p>\n

\"Putterersee\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Because of that acute sense of observation, I can describe to you, today, many years later, the day I sat on the bench overlooking the lake and felt the season change from summer to fall. This is a fine thing to remember and sometimes, when I want to clear my head, I think of that moment, of the light coming from the west and the green reflection on the water and the slight lift and chill in the wind, like remembering the smell of snow. But I envy my young friend in Central America. He has something better. I am projecting, surely, but I imagine he feels himself coming into focus, his edges sharp against the landscape of a far away place.<\/p>\n

With a morning shout to H, may he always travel happy and light. And to my expat posse, D who still lives over there, C who keeps a big chunk of her heart in BC even though her life is in that one country, and S who went home.
\n<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I sucked as an expat. As an inveterate traveler, this was shameful to me, I was embarrassed by the bouts of homesickness. I was ashamed of the days I spent bleakly staring at what was, by all accounts, a breathtakingly beautiful landscape and wishing, with all my might, that I was elsewhere. I felt awkward … <\/p>\n


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